Transcription
3.1 million views on Instagram and Facebook from 100 posts in 97 days. 85 of these posts started as trial reels and led to over 90% of the views and followers that I've gained to date.
So, trial reels are clearly just an incredibly valuable resource to grow your personal brand. And if you aren't leveraging trial reels correctly, then you're falling behind all of the competition in your niche.
Just let that sit for a second because it means the thing you're posting to your grid right now, the thing you're agonizing over and worrying what your followers are thinking might genuinely be the smaller half of your growth engine if you're not running trial reels underneath it.
So, here's what you're actually getting in the next 12 minutes. I'm going to show you how to take a reel you've already made and turn it into five separate chances to go viral again. How to test every single hook before it ever risks your feed so your grid only ever sees winners. And exactly when to actually push a trial reel live because I've got the exact post that taught me how badly you can get the last part wrong. And I'm going to show you all the receipts.
This video is going to ensure that you never get a shadowban notification like this. And we're going to show you some trial reel cheat codes you can lean on to generate thousands of comments to nurture leads and ultimately generate revenue for your business.
You're going to learn from all of my failures, my painful failures, every hook I've tested, every flop, every post that quietly made me more money than my grid ever did. Every single piece of data has been logged by All Growth AI. Every result has been tracked. And before I made this video, I actually pulled the full report on myself right now, so all the data is up to date and nothing I'm about to tell you is a guess. I'm a data nerd and this is what I love to do.
If you're a coach or you're building a personal brand, you are fumbling the bag if you're not posting trial reels consistently. And I'm going to break down exactly how to harness their full potential in this video. Stick around because at the end of this video, I'm giving away an incredibly valuable free resource for you to use straight away that's going to improve your brand and business again and again every month.
Let's dive into the stats and then I'm going to break down the exact system that led to these stats. Of the 100 posts, 85 were trial reels and that led to 2.8 million views. Grid reels, there was 10 of those, 155k views. And carousels, I posted five, which led to 140,000 views. But the engagement rate on carousels is insane. I've had over 600 followers from these five carousels. And my average comments on carousels is sitting at around 650 comments. So if you want me to break down how I generate viral carousels in the next video, make sure you comment that below.
So yeah, all of these 100 posts combined have led to 3.1 million views for my business and my brand. And Claude plus trial reels are the literal cheat code that has enabled most of this growth, which is insane. Make sure you follow along and unleash this strategy because it's probably going to lead to similar results for your business.
If you aren't using trial reels right now and you're struggling to get a lot of organic growth, then this is going to put your organic growth on steroids by allowing you to post way more volume and access new followers that don't already know what your brand is. So that there's way more content out there for your potential ICP and target audience to engage with.
So in the last 100 days, I posted 100 times, which took me from 480 to over 21,000 followers, which is a 44x return. And of that, 2.1 million views were on Instagram. 1 million was from Facebook. You can see all the stats here. 84,000 comments, 110,000 saves, 57,000 shares, and 302,000 total interactions. My engagement rate is sitting at about 10% right now.
I'm going to blitz through the basics here. A trial reel is a separate system on Instagram only that goes to non-followers only. So, think of your grid and trial reels as a completely separate system. You won't get marked for duplicate content for a trial reel that's posted to your grid or a grid post that's posted to trial reels.
Three basics you need to nail. First, make sure you're doing at least three grid posts a week. I have a lot of influencer friends that have meta partnerships. Word on the street is that if you're posting more than 12 times a month, it puts you in a different algorithmic category that boosts your posts. Basically, you want to make sure you're posting at least three times a week to your grid. And then trial reels, you can post up to five times a day. Any more than five times a day, you're risking getting shadowbanned. And the third thing I would say is make sure you have a Facebook page and cross-post to Facebook because 1.1 million of my views in the last 100 days and 4,000 followers have just grown on Facebook and I've never posted to Facebook once. It's all just cross-post from trial reels.
You will get nerfed if you post more than five times a day. And what we want to avoid is these notifications, right? We don't want you seeing this. Your trial reel won't get much reach. If you get that once, it's probably more likely that the algorithm is going to be watching a closer eye on you. So, make sure that you don't post more than five times a day. Five is a safe limit and that's kind of universally been shared online by a bunch of big creators.
So, where do you start right now? After you finish watching this cheat code video, you want to go and post and recycle your biggest winners that have performed well on your grid already. As I said at the start of the video, trial reels is a completely separate system. So, you can literally just repost the exact grid posts that performed well to trial reels to give it another chance at going viral. It feels too simple to work, but it works. I've tested this. It's fine.
So, phase 1A is to post your grid winners straight to trials. You don't have to worry here. You can post the exact same file. One thing I've been doing just to be safe in the Instagram edits app, if you use that, is to duplicate it to a different project and then post from there or to use the version that it's exported to my photos app because I'm skeptical that in the edits app they might have like an ID code on each of the projects in there that they track. But this is only if you're posting the same thing to trials twice. You don't have to worry about when it's a grid post going to a trial reel or vice versa because those are completely separate systems.
Now, the benefit of doing this is if you have a popper like this one here, Claude just killed video editors that performed really well as a straight to grid post. Trial reels go to your immediate location first. I wanted to boost my United States following demographic. So, when I was in the US in May, I literally found a way to repost this reel four more times. So, five total posts to take advantage of the fact that I was in the United States. And ideally, you're leaning into comment CTAs with a lead magnet because it's just going to up to 200x your engagement on these posts.
So 1B is don't just post the same grid post once to your trial reels. Find ways to switch up the hook, switch up the text on screen, and then post it four or five times as trial reels so that you give it a bunch more opportunities to go viral. There's a few things that I've tested that are validated to work here, and I'll run through them right now. One is a new text with the same base layer. Two is to zoom in your Instagram edits app to 1.02 times. Looks exactly the same. You can even use the version that has captions on it. Three is to slow it down to 0.98 times. I don't like doing this personally because it warps the voice weirdly. And four is to speed it up to 1.02 times. This actually can be quite powerful because it makes your video faster and more engaging in that way. With all four of these approaches, you can just switch up the text hook on top and then rinse and repeat them in theory, right? If you have four text hooks and you do these four methods, you can post 16x the exact same grid winner that already went viral on your grid.
So here on my All Growth AI dashboard, I'll show you exactly my approach. I posted two trial reels to A/B test which would perform better. So, these are two slightly different versions with slightly different text hooks. Then I posted the winner to my grid as a completely fresh post and it got 18,000 views, 397 likes, 680 saves. So, that got really good engagement, right? Then a couple weeks later up here when I was in the United States, I wanted to take advantage of being in that location. And these ones didn't pop off as much, but I got a bunch more followers that were in the United States by just recycling this grid post that already did well and one of the trial reels that already did well previously by putting a different text hook on it, posted them again, and took advantage of the location aspects of posting trial reels. So, that was really beneficial for me. And I've done this again and again and again with no issues.
The last thing I want to mention is every 60 days you can find your old trial reel winners and post them again because the algorithm can't store all of that data to remember the hex code, all of the frames of your videos that you've posted 60 days back. So, you can post them again. And I've done this with a super viral batch that I had about 70 days ago. I posted them again 10 days ago and had another boost. So, keep that in mind. It's a good little cheat code.
Once you've done phase one, you've recycled all of your winners, move on to phase two where you start A/B testing your concepts on trial reels before you publish them through to your grid. And there's two ways to publish it. You want to make sure you're doing it the correct way, which I'm going to break down in a second. So test first. Your grid only ever sees the winners. 27 of the 97 days that I've posted A/B/C/D tests over the last 97 days, ran at least two experiments to test different hooks, and sometimes it was up to a 16x just by using like a different 2 to 3 second hook.
Phase two starts by testing first. You want to stop gambling and start leaning on actual data and actual results. As I mentioned before from the same video being tested with slightly different hooks, I've had results like this when I was doing comment CTAs for a list of AI tools that you can use for video workflow. I've had times when A has 16xed the B/C test. I've had times when A has 14xed the B/C test. You can do these in multiple ways. And then again, if it's been 60 days since you did an A/B/C test, you can run that same A/B/C test again with slight changes in the text hook or zooming in and run a second wave 60 days later. Odds are that's still going to pop off for you. There's not really any reason not to unless it no longer serves your ICP and the trajectory that you're trying to take your content.
So, what is the A/B/C/D testing actually look like? For me, it's usually when I'm scripting the video, I'll make sure that I've got four different hooks. I'll literally film everything after the hook. So, all of the emotional beats and the CTA, I'll film and then export that as one brick with the captions glued on. And then I'll just put each of the A/B/C/D hooks on the front of it with a slightly different text on screen and I'll post them all one after the other, like 5 minutes after each other.
With a real example here, I did an Instagram reel about nobody's clicking the link in your bio unless you are doing these three things. You need to be tracking the data on that. You need to be deep linking it so it takes them straight to the app. And you need to give it a custom domain so it looks clean. So, I tested four different hooks because I didn't know which one was going to capture my ICP the best, right? And I want to reassure you here, the same caption is fine. Like, if you're using Claude to generate a caption, you can literally just copy paste that into all four of these A/B/C/D tests and it's not going to be detected for duplicate content. The main thing is changing the visual elements of your video in the first two or three seconds. So, you want to make sure you're changing either the text on screen or you're having a slightly different hook that you are presenting that you're filming of yourself or the visual elements like you're switching the color from black to white for example.
So, as part of phase two, there's two plays for actually promoting a winner. Play A is to take that trial reel, click on manage trial reels in the settings and push it through to your grid. And then Play B is to post it fresh to your grid because again, your grid is a separate system to trial reel. So, you literally can just take the exact same Instagram edits or CapCut file that you have exported and post it straight to your grid. I've tested both of these numerous times and what I will say to you is you want to make Play A when you've tested a trial reel like a weird new format or something different that kind of serves a different ICP to your normal target audience because you want that to hit your grid with the social proof built in that it already has 10 comments and it already has some likes on there. You know, the last thing you want is to post to your grid and it's something that doesn't actually serve your followers. No one engages with it and it just flops.
Play B is best to make when you have an absolute popper in trial reels and you know it's going to work well for your ICP like for me if it's an AI video tool or it's a content system. I know that my followers want that. There is no downside to just posting that exact same thing to your grid. Then you have two rocket ships. One is in your trial reels blasting off to 100k views and getting you hundreds if not thousands of followers. Then you post a fresh one to your existing followers and most of the time that's going to pop even harder because it's starting with an already warm follower base that wants to see that type of content. And I'm going to run through an example of that in a minute.
Here's an example of Play A, which is when you go into manage trials and push it through to your grid. I had two trial reels out of this A/B/C/D test. One of them had 2,000 views. The other one had 2,300 views. Right? If you look at the screen to the left here, these are the two different reels. So, the one on the left had more views, a better average watch time, a lower skip rate. They had about the same save rate, and had a slightly smaller comment rate. And you want to go and look into your reel insights and see the engagement graph. And the engagement graph is decent here. Like obviously 50% of people dropped off immediately because a lot of people it's not going to suit for. But then it flattens out quite nicely, right? And this is what you want to see to qualify a trial reel if it's worthy of being pushed through to your feed. And the results speak for themselves. When I pushed this through to my feed, this one got three times the views and at least 10 times the comments. It started with like 10 comments. Now it has 190. And those are real leads that are engaging with me. They find this content useful. They're going through my DM automations and then they're either coming through to my YouTube or to my email list, right? So, I'm nurturing these leads and I'm going to continue being able to engage them from there. If we come through to the Instagram stats here, you'll see that 50% of these views came from my followers. So, the followers can give it a good algorithmic boost, which then is going to push it to more of your non-followers, right?
But here's an example of Play B, which is after you test it in trial reels, you can post it straight to your grid. In this case, more than 5x that just walloped the views of the trial reel versions. You can see here that I posted two different versions. One literally just listed the tools first and the other one listed what the tools do first and I just swapped them around to test. And the one that had the tools first 2xed it, got like 1,600 views in the first 24 hours. Right? So then I went and posted this straight to my grid. It's so far got 1,300 comments, almost 1,000 likes and 140,000 views. That's the case where I knew this was going to feed my ICP. I knew they were going to like this. So I just posted it straight to my grid and it blitzed the trial reels and just went bonkers.
Now the rule that I learned the hard way and what you want to be careful of is the 48-hour rule or the 25% rule. I'll explain these both very quickly. The 48-hour rule is basically in the first 48 hours, if you are to manage your trial reel and push it through to your grid, it's going to go to the feed of your followers and it's going to be pushed out there as kind of like a normal grid post. So, it's going to have a chance to get re-engagement from your followers and do exactly what this reel did where it took it from 2.3K views to now 9K views, right? So, that's the 48-hour rule. And it doesn't really matter if engagement has dropped off. You know, if you're posting after it's been 40 hours and it hasn't had a comment in 20 hours. That was the case for that link video and it still crushed.
Now, the 25% rule. This is if you're leaving your trial reels because they're getting really good engagement over longer periods of time, like four or five days. If it's humming, you don't want to let it get to the point where the next day it's got less than 25% views added to it than what it had the previous day. So, to make this very simple, if it had 10,000 views on day four, and then on day five it only got to 12,000 views, it's getting too late to push it through to your grid because it's dying down in the trial reels algorithm. And basically what I learned from my first ever trial reel I posted it got 40k views and I was like holy moly. I A/B tested it. It was literally this thing over here. I A/B tested it with just the same version with a white background. This one like 15x the views. The other one got like 4,000 and this one got 40,000. So 10x the views. But I left it for over a week and it got 40,000 views in the first like 2 days. If I had pushed that through to my feed, it would have got another boost from my followers and might have got to 50 to 100k views and brought me a bunch more followers and leads for my business. But I left it cuz I didn't know what I was doing. When I pushed it through to my feed, I kid you not, it literally got one like. It got one like from my followers. It didn't lead to any new engagement at all. It just was dead and it just sat there stale. So that's why you want to follow either the 48-hour rule or the 25% rule.
So what does this mean? Trial reels are insanely overpowered for organic growth for your business and your brand. 92% of my new followers in the last 3 months have come from trial reels. And that led to 20,500 new followers in 97 days. And I've had 151 views per new follower. And from just five carousels that I posted, by the way, I've had 576 followers come in. And my average carousel comments is like 600 comments. So, if you guys want me to break down how to generate carousels using Claude, comment that down below and I can show you the system that I use for that.
But the thing I want to reiterate is that none of these trial reel cheat codes work anywhere near as well without irresistible value for your target audience through lead magnets. You want to be giving them a reason to comment and engage and DM your account and flow through your funnel. Essentially, I've done this by sharing free tools, sharing guides for my audience. Then I can start conversations with them from there. I'll have email-gated guides so that they'll join my email newsletter and then I'll have a lot of people reply to my newsletter and I'll start conversations with leads from there. And also, you'll have a book a call link on all of your lead magnets and your VSSL will be in there. So, there's just a bunch of touch points for your leads to be able to flow through and engage with your business and engage in conversations with you or your appointment setter.
What I need you to understand is that a comment CTA with irresistible value in your Instagram reel is literally just putting your engagement on steroids. Look at these stats. 81 out of my 100 captions had irresistible value in them. They had a comment CTA. Those 81 posts on average 13x the average views of the posts that didn't have a comment CTA and got over 180 times the average comments. Like, it's literally a no-brainer to build lead magnets and put comment CTAs in your posts. Obviously, you don't want to flood your feed with just comment CTAs. You want to have some top-of-funnel content, some middle-of-funnel content, and some bottom-of-funnel content where you're just putting your personality out there and you're not saying "comment X and I'll give you Y" because that's going to become way too transactional, right? But when the transactional posts are printing like this, it would be silly not to test some comment CTAs, build some lead magnets. This is exactly what has worked really well for me and this is exactly what's working really well for my clients.
So, one example here is for Jordan. Jordan is an agency coach and he posted a YouTube video about how to solve churn for your agency with the 72-hour rule. So, we put a comment CTA on one of his short-form videos that said "comment churn" and "we'll send you the full breakdown." And all it is is an email-gated link to his YouTube. So, it captures their email on the way to his YouTube so that they'll join his email newsletter if they want to opt-in and then they go straight to his YouTube. It's boosting his YouTube algorithm. It's 5xing his normal engagement rate. He typically gets five or six comments on a post. This one got over 50 comments. From this single reel, we got 20 email activations from ICP leads for his business that we've now been nurturing into sales calls.
Again, not only is it putting your short-form content on steroids, it's putting your YouTube algorithm on steroids because all of your short-form audience is going to your YouTube and it's telling the YouTube algorithm who wants to see your videos and it's running up the watch time and the views on a YouTube video. And I literally tested this out with my first ever YouTube video. I put comment CTAs on a bunch of my short-form content that related to my first YouTube video, which is about how I got 5,000+ inbound leads with an organic content system. And it got over 1,000 views in the first week. And I got over 50 subscribers from this. The like ratio is great. There's comments from my ICP in there that I've been chatting to. This organic flywheel is just a cheat code in itself. Like if you're unleashing trial reels with comment CTAs through to a lead magnet that sends them to an email newsletter and to your YouTube, it all just feeds itself and it becomes this organic content system, this flywheel where your leads are just getting value left, right, and center. So many different touch points where they can flow through to book a call with you.
This is working so well for me and my clients that I want you to be able to unleash the same strategy as well. That's the whole system start to finish. Recycle your winners. Test everything as a trial before it ever touches your feed because the hook alone was the difference between 5,000 views and 140,000 views in some of these cases. And put your short-form content on steroids by building an organic growth flywheel that feeds your newsletter and your YouTube with lead magnets to provide way more touch points for your audience to engage with.
Make sure to subscribe if you found this video at all valuable to you and your business. I post a new video every week breaking down similar systems that will help you with your organic growth. And comment down below what you want me to cover in the next video. I read every single comment and it helps me know what you guys want to see from me so I can script videos to help you grow your organic systems more.
Now, at the start of the video, I told you to stick around for a valuable resource. What I want to give you is the ability to do this exact audit that I've done to create these slides here for your own social media channels so that you can dive deeply into the data and understand exactly what you can lean into to scale your own business faster, whether that's trial reel cheat codes or some other thing that Claude is going to surface for you, right? To get the exact guide and prompt to do an audit like this for your social media channels, for your business, head to my Instagram, it's in the description, and DM me "secret" and I'll flick you the link.
If you made it this far, I appreciate you. Thank you for watching. And if you haven't seen my breakdown of how I got 5,000+ inbound leads in 49 days, you should click that video right now and get your notepad out. All right, peace and catch you in the next one.